Shimar Stephens showed up to a community meeting with Toronto Police to say he’s frustrated after being stopped 15 times.

Like many of the other 18 participants on Friday night, it was the first time he’d spoken with police outside of being carded.

“It makes me feel like there’s something wrong with me. Is it the way I dress? Is it the way I walk?” asked Stephens, 18, who lives in Lawrence Heights, and says he’s been carded by police in his neighbourhood 15 times over the last two years. The practice is also called a street check.

It was the eighth community consultation held by police in the last few weeks, part of a massive undertaking started by the force in March to review all of the policies and procedures regarding its interactions with the public, including carding.

Supt. David McLeod of 31 Division said this was the first consultation with youth.

“Let’s correct what needs to be corrected. Let’s get the input from the people most affected, and let’s apply those with a view to correcting it going forward,” he said. “And that’s what we got today.”

The meeting, which was closed to the media, was held at For Youth Initiative, which works to reduce violence and build leadership skills for marginalized youth in the Weston-Mount Dennis priority area.

“The youth are angry. They’re frustrated. There’s a lot of room for improvement between police and community,” said Odion Fayalo, a youth outreach worker at F.Y.I., who facilitated the event. “More consultations like this need to happen.

In March 2012, the Toronto Star ran a series that used police data to show officers stop black and brown individuals at disproportionately high rates. An individual’s personal information, such as name, age, address and race are documented by officers during the interaction and the information is kept in an ever-expanding police database used for investigations. Toronto police document up to 400,000 people a year, most in non-criminal encounters.

After the Star series, the city’s police board implemented a number of measures to make officers more accountable for who they card.

One of those measures will begin Monday when police start issuing receipts — called a Form 307 — to people who have been carded during street checks.

Stephens doesn’t think the receipts will make a difference.

“It would just be me having more papers in my wallet saying I’ve been stopped such and such times. It wouldn’t change the fact that I’m being stopped.”

Another measure ordered by the board, an independent audit of the police carding data by the city’s auditor general, will be put off for at least a year because of this wider review by the force.

Friday’s community consultation followed a virtual town hall Thursday night that was done by telephone on the topic of carding and racial profiling. About 20,000 people across the city participated in the random phone survey, with 15 per cent of the calls going out to priority neighbourhoods.

Fayalo said the general consensus after Friday’s meeting is that it was a move in a positive direction.

“(The youth) opened up, and I was pleasantly surprised,” said Fayalo. “I think the youth see the police making a genuine step.”

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